It is not necessary, however, to make all distinctions invidious and all comparisons odious. Individually and collectively the Victorian satirists are to be accepted with the ungrudging appreciation they deserve. The terribly exacting author of The New Machiavelli recognized in their endowment to us nothing but “emasculated thought,” “a hasty trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind,” “a persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated by not thinking about it,”—all resulting in “the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls.” But there is consolation in the counter-discovery of Professor Sherman (in his Modern Literature) that there was a compensating economy, even in their failure: “Dickens, Kingsley, Reade, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest,” he reminds us, “they did not seek to make the world over, but only to accomplish a few, simple things like abolishing slavery, sweat-shops, Corn Laws, the schools of Squeers, imprisonment for debt, the red tape of legal procedure, the belief in pestilence and typhoid as visitations of God—and all that sort of piddling amelioration.”
For this modest ambition, the Victorians found satire an effective means, and they proved they could turn it also to more purely artistic uses. Such as their achievement was, they are doubtless content to rest in peace upon it, granting without jealousy to their illustrious successors whatever surpassing results they may be able to accomplish.
CHAPTER II
THE VICTORIAN CONTRIBUTION
By the nineteenth century the general inheritance in ideas and methods had become so cumulatively rich and various that the chances for novelty might seem correspondingly meager. But there is always something new under the sun, and the process of amalgamating that modicum of newness with the great bulk of the old and established goes steadily and eternally on—except for abnormal phases of retrogression, or revolution—forming that ceaseless change in changelessness we call history. The body of satiric tradition bequeathed to the Victorians underwent, accordingly, a normal amount of subtraction, addition, and modification, before being passed on to their successors.
The endowment itself was large and comprehensive, including both substance and modes, as well as a supplementary current of criticism and interpretation. In none of these were the Victorians responsible for a transformation, yet none did they leave in statu quo. In form, however, a great change had recently occurred, operating both positively and negatively, of which they were just in time to take advantage. The positive side of it was the development of the satiric novel in the preceding century, whereby the channel of fiction had already been accommodated to the satiric stream. This tendency was reinforced by the negative side, the abandonment of English satire’s one conventional outlet, the heroic couplet, which naturally diverted the current still more. The chance that made Byron not only a brilliant climax to the long line that extended back to Hall and Lodge, and through them to Juvenal and Horace, but the conclusion as well, is one of the striking situations in the history of literature. This transference of the main bulk of satire from the medium of poetry to that of prose would probably have been accomplished in any case, for since the Romantic Triumph, poetry had been again devoted to its true mission as the voice of imagination and spiritual vision, while at the same time the novel was finding a congenial sphere of action as a public forum for the discussion of all things from current events to a philosophy of life. Satire, being presumably a utilitarian product, would naturally be more suitably allied with fiction, a branch of Applied Art, than with the Pure Art of poetry. This union is advantageous for another reason,—the improvement as to proportion. In verse satire the emphasis is on the satire; in satiric fiction, the former noun has been relegated to the qualifying function of the adjective. Since one of the perils of satire is over-emphasis, and since it can best avoid this peril by combination, the gain in this arrangement is obvious. As a matter of fact, pure, isolated satire is a non-existent abstraction, as is illustrated by the very circumstance of the origin of the name. The satura lanx was a dish of assorted fruit, and the primitive saturæ which borrowed its name were the impromptu miscellanies in speech which constituted the social part of the old Roman Harvest Home. Lucilius and later Horace, wanting a title for their running commentary on men and manners, found this conveniently ready. When Juvenal adopted it, he had no notion of restricting the application:[427]
“Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli.”
With all these things is the modern novel also concerned, and it too finds some of them amenable to humorous treatment, and some only to serious. But so far as change is concerned, it occurs during this period more in substance than in form. Vice and Folly are still the nominal targets, whenever these traits seem to be a cause or an effect of Deceit.[428] But they are somewhat altered in shape, in consequence of a more subtle analysis of their nature. The great discovery was made about the deceiver that he is quite as likely as not to be deceiving himself as well as others,—more than others, indeed, inasmuch as his very blindness renders him the more transparent. The world, moreover, growing in suspiciousness and incredulity, is the less easily deceived and the more able to detect the fraud, which thus reacts like a boomerang against its perpetrator. In the nineteenth century Pecksniff really was an archaism; and since Dickens no novelist has portrayed anything so bald as an unadulterated and unexplained hypocrite.[429] The evolution in portrayal from the hypocrite to the sentimentalist is perfectly illustrated by the difference between Pecksniff and Bulstrode. For the latter we have only a little less sympathy than for Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmisdale, in spite of his inferiority in fineness and ultimate courage. For we are shown the “strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had longed for years to be better than he was.”[430] Even his prayer after becoming virtually a murderer is not really a piece of hypocrisy. “Does anyone suppose,” asks Eliot, “that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action?”[431]
George Eliot is, however, even more impressed with the auto-intoxication of optimism as it manifests itself in what might be called group psychology; and especially against a disregard of the law of cause and effect does she turn the shafts of her quiet irony. At the period when the Raveloe tale opens,—[432]
“It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favor of Providence toward the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels.”